ARM developments coming to a Windows laptop near you

[egbert]

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/02/ ... ops_nuvia/
Opening paras:

Qualcomm has vowed to unleash a generation of laptop processors that will rival Apple's M-series chips, though they won't arrive until late 2023.

That's the latest word from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who said development is "on track" for the Arm-compatible, Windows-friendly system-on-chips during his company's second-quarter earnings call [PDF] last week.

The update provides a little more granularity to the general 2023 shipping timeline Qualcomm provided last fall for its M-class laptop chips, whose custom CPU cores and design team were gained through Qualy's $1.4 billion acquisition of Nuvia in early 2021.

[jamcat]

As predicted.
M1 was an extinction-level event.
Intel architecture is EOL.

[chk071]

As predicted.
M1 was an extinction-level event.
Intel architecture is EOL.

1. There are already Windows on ARM devices.
2. It won't lead to other CPU architectures becoming "EOL".

If you're being serious, of course. With that level of BS, I just can't be sure.

[uOpt]

Apple silicon's performance also depends on the OS quite a bit. You can see that when booting Linux or OpenBSD on them - they don't reach the same performance as under macOS. Lots of complicated power and frequency management bits in the OS.

So even if they release the CPU they have more work to do.

[wvshpr]

With mobile devices being pre-dominant sellers and the increased focus on power efficiency, I don't think there are going to be many x86 devices on the market in 10 years.

Apple always understood that hardware and software need to be one and the same for the optimal experience. Microsoft and co. are slowly waking up to that. If they want to compete they'll have to make their own chips.

[egbert]

Apple silicon's performance also depends on the OS quite a bit. You can see that when booting Linux or OpenBSD on them - they don't reach the same performance as under macOS. Lots of complicated power and frequency management bits in the OS.

So even if they release the CPU they have more work to do.

If these are released for more open platforms like the PC or Linux, the specs of the new ARM hardware will be open to those compiling and tweaking an OS for the new chips. With the Mx family, 3rd party OS developers are more or less hacking their way onto that hardware without Apple's assistance mostly cf the Hackintosh. They don't necessarily have the collaboration of chip's creator, whereas Qualcom will want to maximise customers for their hardware and will therefore be prepared to open the kimono so that the software may fully exploit the platform and be maximally competitive with the offerings of other vendors - including other ARM vendors and x86 types. These are not the concerns of those running a walled garden.

BTW - lots of the big players in hardware have ARM licences so I would expect plenty of competition.

[uOpt]

Apple silicon's performance also depends on the OS quite a bit. You can see that when booting Linux or OpenBSD on them - they don't reach the same performance as under macOS. Lots of complicated power and frequency management bits in the OS.

So even if they release the CPU they have more work to do.

If these are released for more open platforms like the PC or Linux, the specs of the new ARM hardware will be open to those compiling and tweaking an OS for the new chips. With the Mx family, 3rd party OS developers are more or less hacking their way onto that hardware without Apple's assistance mostly cf the Hackintosh. They don't necessarily have the collaboration of chip's creator, whereas Qualcom will want to maximise customers for their hardware and will therefore be prepared to open the kimono so that the software may fully exploit the platform and be maximally competitive with the offerings of other vendors - including other ARM vendors and x86 types. These are not the concerns of those running a walled garden.

BTW - lots of the big players in hardware have ARM licences so I would expect plenty of competition.

Well, in its past so far Qualcomm has been very hostile to open source.

I wonder who makes the ARM chips in Amazon's EC2.

[jupiter8]

I wonder who makes the ARM chips in Amazon's EC2.

They're designed by an Israeli firm, Annapurna Labs, that Amazon bought and manufactured by TSMC.

[egbert]

Thus far, Qualcom don't sell direct to the end user like Apple, they sell to hardware manufacturers. So if HP or Dell or some other hardware company want to build and sell Nuvia based ARM laptops, then Qualcom will have to share their proprietary info with that vendor, in the same way that Intel and AMD currently do with their customers and all the motherboard vendors. That disclosure may be limited to a degree but perhaps not in a way that would be seriously deleterious to the operation of the product. (I am thinking of Intel's extra CPU and OS built into the hardware here.)

[machinesworking]

As predicted.
M1 was an extinction-level event.
Intel architecture is EOL.

1. There are already Windows on ARM devices.
2. It won't lead to other CPU architectures becoming "EOL".

If you're being serious, of course. With that level of BS, I just can't be sure.

There is some truth to this IMO. Apples thermal performance is definitely going to be copied and replicated. I think people don't realize the significance, because the way Apple does it is not really about biggest fastest etc. but the fact is unless somehow you can't make a 128 core version of these Arm chips, you can see how this ramps up, and it's impressive. That's where Qualcom and others can shine, they don't care as much about making the leanest machine, but the fastest and most powerful for the cheapest.

[chk071]

Mobile CPU's are great for what they do. But, obviously, they're a compromise, and meant for machines which are small, slim, and portable, and should last long on battery. If you want the best performance, so far, there's no alternative to tech which consumes power, thus will heat up. Naturally.

Again, I very well see the use of such mobile CPU's. It's not this vs. that. It's tech for a different use case.

And, also again, there are already Windows on ARM machines for quite a while now. It's nothing new. First, there was Windows RT (I think about 2010), and then there was Windows 10 on ARM, from 2016.

[egbert]

Some of the comments under that article in the Reg explore the implications of the Mx design where graphics and RAM are integrated with the CPU rather than being separated on the board. Power and latency issues are managed differently by that strategy but this may not suit a chip/system that is being supplied for a diversity of machines built by a range of manufacturers.

The trend toward component integration has progressed over the 40 year evolution of the PC platform. If you look at the board for a 386 or 486 system from 30 years ago, the chipset consists of many separate chips (dozens and dozens) on the board, handling I/O and communication with expansion busses etc, external cache memory etc. One by one, almost all of these functions have been absorbed into the CPU itself, as subunits of the main silicon chip which has grown from a few hundred thousand transistors (eg 386) to many billions of transistors.

The capacity for system expansion and adding more RAM or upgrading graphics during the life of a machine etc is more the province of desktop machines these days than anything mobile so the trend to integrate graphics and RAM into the CPU or into some kind of multichip cluster that is complete and unchangeable after manufacture may be the new norm for mobile devices.

[Markus Krause]

Intel architecture is EOL.

That's not true at all. There are new AMD Ryzen and Intel chipsets coming this year. They are created with N5 node. This means faster and less power consumption.
Apart from this ARM on Windows does already exist for many years. It could not gain a significant market share due to the lack of advantages and weak performance.

[machinesworking]

Mobile CPU's are great for what they do. But, obviously, they're a compromise, and meant for machines which are small, slim, and portable, and should last long on battery. If you want the best performance, so far, there's no alternative to tech which consumes power, thus will heat up. Naturally.

Again, I very well see the use of such mobile CPU's. It's not this vs. that. It's tech for a different use case.

And, also again, there are already Windows on ARM machines for quite a while now. It's nothing new. First, there was Windows RT (I think about 2010), and then there was Windows 10 on ARM, from 2016.

Lol, the fastest supercomputer right now is an Arm array. This can't be stressed enough, everything is about thermals, you match a speed at a lower degree level, you can ramp up speeds, cores everything. This is why the Intel chips made for mobile devices! ended up being i7, i9 etc.

[Markus Krause]

Computers that are relevant for professional audio-production are desktops. Many hobby musicians also use laptops.

You can't compare mainframes/'supercomputers' to these machines. They got a completely different architecture. It's highly parallel and operates with thousands of cores. They need special software that is written for a very specific task. The guys who build these machines pick CPUs mainly by price in relation to processing power and operation costs.